Onstage Cataclysm: The Play-within-the-Play in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy

Art’s manipulation of reality informs Frederick Kiefer’s essay. In Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy Hieronimo avenges the death of his son by staging a play wherein courtiers responsible for the murder are cast as characters in a revenge drama. Their stage deaths turn out to be real. This idea of reality manipulated by theatre is then applied to Lyndon Johnson’s use of the fictive Tonkin Gulf incident to justify a military buildup in Vietnam and to the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” perpetrated by the Bush administration as an excuse to attack Iraq.